Customer Reviews

Gilded Leaf: Triumph, Tragedy, and Tobacco : Three Generations of the R J Reynolds Family and Fortune

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Excellent tale of the Reynolds family. The authors have written a wonderfully engrossing tale of wealth, privilege, tragedy, & heartache. Highly recommended!

I had the opportunity to receive an original hardcover copy of this book some time ago, and was immediately captivated by the story, which indeed plays out more like a fictional novel than the history of a true-life family. This isn't just about how one family developed a tobacco empire, this is about how tobacco has influenced our culture, our way of life, and the very way our country goes about its daily business. Not necessarily disapproving of tobacco in general, Reynolds prefers to simply tell the story and let the actions of the characters, of the company itself, influence the reader's opinion.

Kudos to Booksinprint for putting this book back into print ... it's a welcome keyhole into the private life of one of the country's most influential tobacco barons.

This past summer I visited Winston Salem and was given a great tour of the area from a person who's granddaddy was a friend of Dick Reynolds. During the tour he was telling me a lot of the history of the town which I found very fascinating. When he told me that Patrick Reynolds had written a book about the family, I just had to read it. It is hard to believe when you read it that it is a true story as it reads like a novel that would have made one heck of a TV saga. I found it very educational, interesting and very entertaining. I'm so glad I bought it.

The Gilded Leaf is the best book available about the R.J. Reynolds family. It was critically acclaimed and co-authored by Tom Shachtman and RJ Reynolds' son, Patrick Reynolds, who had access to numerous private interviews with family members.

Reynolds and Shachtman depict every Reynolds family scandal in unsparing detail; Patrick was disinherited by his father. It's a juicy read!

The Washington Post Book World called The Gilded Leaf "An altogether fascinating story that quickly builds speed and interest and becomes an absorbing story of fortune and misfortune."

Publishers Weekly said, "Readers of this captivating account may need to remind themselves that it is not fiction. There are colorful characters, a family rising from humble beginnings to attain fabulous wealth and power, scandal and tragedy wrought by excess--and an irony-laden finale."

The Washington Times noted, "Fiction doesn't get any better than this. It's the kind of true-life story Hollywood scriptwriters dream about -- murder, mayhem, messy divorces, titillating escapades of a tobacco dynasty, souls bared to the tabloids, racing through life in the fast lane... The Reynolds family makes TV's `Dynasty' look downright hokey."

The Gilded Leaf tells the colorful, often scandalous story of the RJ Reynolds family, who helped popularize smoking in America. This book has it all -- incredible wealth, messy divorces, titillating romances, murders, mysterious deaths, lavish lifestyles, larger than life personalities, and famous figures of the various eras it moves through.

Best of all, it was co-authored by one of the most acclaimed authors of our time, Tom Shachtman, and a disinherited Reynolds family member, Patrick Reynolds.

This book may even make it to television; co-author Reynolds claims to have legally secured, while they were still alive, the rights "for all time" to depict the key characters in the book on TV.

This was ordered for a Christmas present to be sent to Portland, Oregon. The recipent of the gift was very pleased with the book. It was as advertsed.

While the Kid Carolina book is a fair read I was pleasantly surprised to also find the book by Tom Shachtman and Patrick Reynolds, who is the disinherited son of Kid Carolina, was available. The Gilded Leaf has by far the best details and juciest stories. It has all of the stories and all of the insight into this Reynolds clan. A very good read!

The Gilded Leaf: Triumph, Tragedy, and Tobacco: Three Generations of the R. J. Reynolds Family and Fortune